The present invention relates generally to instant messaging systems and methodologies.
Instant messaging has continually risen in importance as a business productivity solution. New capabilities and functionality have been continuously added on top of the existing one-on-one message exchange and presence information that form the basis of instant messaging. These capabilities include group chat, audio and video messages, collaborative tools, and file transfer.
Although significant work has gone into extending the functionality of instant-messaging systems, the level of granularity available for utilizing these systems is still surprisingly large. Instant-messaging software typically provides the ability to communicate with one other person, with a small group of people explicitly chosen by the user, and sometimes with a predefined large group of people. There is no way to automatically target a message (or chat invitation or audio clip or file transfer) to people meeting a certain criteria. Therefore, what is needed in the art is way to automatically target a message to an individual or audience satisfying selected criteria.